Meetings are considered as one of the most important activity in a business environment. Many organizations hold regular meetings as part of their routine operations. Delivering information, keeping each other updated, discussing issues around team projects, assigning tasks, tracking progress and making decisions are some of the reasons why meetings are very important part of a professional and human activity. Recording meetings are as important as conducting them. Members of an organization access past meeting records to recall details of a particular meeting or to catch up with others if they missed a meeting. People often refer to meeting records. The reasons include checking the consistency of statements and descriptions, revisiting the portions of a meeting which were missed or not understood, re-examining past positions in the light of new information and obtaining supportive evidence.
Before the advancement of computer and communication technologies, a significant amount of time and effort was spent on producing written documents related to the meetings. Transforming meeting minutes into written documents manually suffers from lack of accuracy, completeness and objectivity. The process of transforming meeting minutes into written documents puts a burden on the preparer who may not remember all the details or transcribe them correctly. Advances in computer and communication technologies made networked multimedia meetings possible. Virtual meetings over the Internet by sharing desktop applications and whiteboards with the integration of text, audio and video capturing capabilities have become a popular means of conducting meetings among the geographically dispersed users. Vast amount of audio, visual and textual data are being recorded and stored for such virtual meetings.